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Album Review
Noah and the Whale The First Days of SpringMercury
Article written by
Adam W - Sep 28, 2009
Ah… the break-up album. The dreaded rite of passage which every young band will find themselves stumbling toward sooner or later in their musical development. For Noah and the Whale this has come alarmingly quickly for it was only last year their trite and merry (but youthfully self-pitying) debut was making a rather unnecessary name for themselves. Of all of frontman Charlie Fink’s naff philosophical rumblings of love and life one which especially wedged its way into the public conscious was from the gleefully banal Five Years Time, in which he endlessly mused “There’ll be love, love, love wherever you go…”
That boy is clearly not one gifted with foresight, for they have arrived at album #2 barely 12 months later with love absolutely nowhere to be seen. There is only loss, loss, loss wherever Mr. Fink goes at the moment… But, strangely, this loss could’ve proved Noah and the Whale’s saving grace for this is an unexpectedly brilliant listen which, musically at least, is repeatedly flawless in its execution.
Opener The First Days of Spring sets the tone – and it’s fantastic. A solitary rasping riff soon builds into a tense, beautifully orchestrated piece of lonesome melodrama with Fink’s voice bursting with sadness over the top. When the strings swell and the guitars lift and he fawns “everyone… has one chance… to fuck uuuuuuuup their lives…” over the top, it really does sound absolutely magnificent.
The album continues in this vein - switching from intense and beefed up tales of heartache with a few lonesome strummers thrown in for good measure. Only centrepiece For The Love of an Orchestra really deviates from this – a bizarre operatic choral explosion which, for some reason, actually works. This album sounds wonderful, with sparing orchestration used perfectly to create a sophisticated and moving listen. There is barely a trumpet, a violin or a piano out of place and this shows a stunning grasp of musical maturity for a band still so young.
The only problem is the lyrics, which are so relentlessly obvious and comprehensive in their chronicling of romantic loss it’s almost as if the band have actively sought to reach a quota of every heartbroken cliché in the book. However, it is to their credit that they have ultimately managed to create a musical work of such depth and grace which transcends all of this. Whilst they need desperately to write lyrics of significance and substance, The First Days of Spring shows that they may still be flawed, but they are resoundingly no longer unnecessary.